Work Text:
That day, just as I planted my foot on the first step of the staircase, I ran into Mrs Hudson on her way back down from our rooms. The moment she spotted me, she brushed past with a look of weary exasperation. "He hasn't moved a muscle since this morning," she said.
Her words were entirely predictable, of course. And yet I couldn't help the enormous sigh that escaped me — the sort of sigh that comes from a place of bone-deep resignation.
There was, without question, something profoundly abnormal about the habits of my flatmate, Sherlock Holmes, and both Mrs Hudson and I suffered daily on account of them. To be fair, his mind was extraordinarily methodical and precise, and as for his appearance — well, aside from a certain cavalier willingness to subject designer shirts to chemical experiments — he was, by all outward evidence, remarkably well turned-out. But his domestic habits were nothing short of catastrophic, and during an active investigation, when every last ounce of his energy was poured into the Work, they descended into utter chaos. The sitting room existed in a state of permanent devastation. His sleep schedule bore no relation to any known pattern of human existence. At ungodly hours, the mournful wail of a violin would fill the flat, and at equally ungodly hours, frantic clients would arrive screaming on our doorstep. The kitchen, I should add, had long since been converted into a biohazard-level laboratory for dubious experiments in chemistry and biology. And he had, on more than one occasion, helped himself to my service pistol and redecorated the landlady's walls with bullet holes. When it came to the singular talent of driving one's landlady and flatmate to distraction, Sherlock Holmes could have made a credible bid for the Guinness Book of Records as the worst man in British history. The sigh I mentioned at the outset was occasioned by what might, in many respects, be called his most troublesome vice of all.
When I entered the sitting room, the worst man in British history was folded into his sofa, fingertips pressed together, glaring at nothing. Mrs Hudson had said he hadn't moved since morning, but I could supplement her observation from my own experience of sharing the flat: he had barely moved since the previous evening. Yesterday morning, he had gone to the scene of a crime into which his client had become entangled, scrutinised various points of interest, had a blazing row with the officer in charge at the Yard, returned home, and assumed this position. He had not shifted since. Furthermore, in the two days since accepting this case, he had neither slept nor eaten. And before that, he had been running himself ragged on another matter entirely, with scarcely a proper meal or a wink of sleep. By my reckoning, it had been the better part of a week since he had taken anything resembling rest. I glanced sideways at Sherlock, whose face was growing visibly gaunt, then let my gaze fall to the table, where a fried egg — untouched and long since gone cold — stared reproachfully back at me.
"...You've skipped another meal. You really ought to put something in your stomach before you do yourself actual harm."
As expected — as entirely expected — there was no response. His mind had vacated this cramped little flat, leaving his body behind like an abandoned vessel, and was wandering somewhere in the boundless corridors of his Mind Palace. Once he entered this state, he became virtually impervious to external stimuli or bodily needs. Bad enough on its own, but during these marathon sessions of cogitation — which could stretch on for hours — anything and anyone unconnected to the case was treated as mere noise, an impediment to the purity of his reasoning. He would reject the presence of another person standing nearby, resist being touched or spoken to (though what exactly he perceived in this state remained unclear), and shut out the world with the ruthless efficiency of a closing airlock. Nor was it only other people he ignored; his own body's distress signals received the same contemptuous dismissal. The one saving grace was that when the deduction finally clicked into place, his personality would undergo an instant transformation — he'd spring into furious, kinetic action, as if making up for every motionless hour in a single burst. But that was when the deduction did click into place.
What if it didn't?
I broke the established rule — do not approach him when he is thinking — and moved to stand at his feet. I lowered myself to the floor and looked up at his face, taking in the dark circles that had carved themselves beneath his eyes, and spoke slowly, gently. Yes. Exactly as one might speak to a petulant child in the grip of a truly monumental tantrum.
"Sherlock. Doctor's orders. Time to eat."
"—Digestion requires processing power I cannot currently spare."
"Food and sleep are the bare minimum for keeping a human body alive."
"Both irrelevant. System resources are allocated. John. Just — be quiet!"
He snapped back without so much as shifting his gaze. That he hadn't erupted into a full-blown tirade — the sort he reserved for Scotland Yard personnel who dared interrupt his thought process — might have been a sign that he afforded me some measure of trust. Or it might simply have meant he was conserving even the energy it would take to shout. I shook my head, got to my feet, and approached the table with its cold, abandoned breakfast once more. Mrs Hudson had apparently cleared away my portion already. The remaining bacon had congealed into a waxy, pallid mass; the potatoes, which had been steaming just hours ago, had shrivelled into sad, withered husks. A fruit bowl sat nearby, containing several handsome apples, but these too showed no sign of having been touched.
"Is the client still in custody?"
"He was the only person who saw the victim around the estimated time of death."
"But you don't think he did it."
"A man who knows perfectly well that suspicion will fall on him, yet takes no precaution whatsoever, kills a man, contacts the Yard himself, and then — without the faintest whiff of alarm — waltzes in to commission me to sort it out. Unless he is a colossal idiot, this behaviour makes no sense."
He spat the words out, and then — for the first time since I'd come back into the room — his expression shifted. Yes. The young man who had brought the case to Sherlock the previous day was currently being held at Scotland Yard as a suspect. The circumstances, in brief, were these: the client was a descendant of a world-famous author, and had been attempting to sell a cache of his ancestor's unpublished manuscripts — discovered in his own home — through an art dealer he knew, at an overseas collectors' auction. But the art dealer had recently been murdered by person or persons unknown, and the tin box containing the manuscripts had vanished. The distressed client had come to Sherlock asking him to trace the missing box — so far, so reasonable — only to find himself promptly hauled off to the Yard as a murder suspect. The Yard's theory, as I understood it, was that the client had grown dissatisfied with the price the dealer was offering, killed him, and taken the manuscripts back. I had to say, though, that I found this line of reasoning far from convincing.
"The client could have recovered the manuscripts without resorting to murder."
Sherlock spoke with his head bowed.
"There was more than ample time to negotiate the price. He is not a man prone to rash decisions — quite the contrary, he overthinks to the point of indecision. Hardly the temperament of a criminal. And yet the art dealer was killed. Killed on impulse. And the manuscripts, which had been kept under lock and key, vanished — as though their disappearance had been carefully planned. A man who kills impulsively, hides methodically, constructs no alibi whatsoever, and continues to protest his innocence with desperate conviction. Unless our client is Dr Jekyll and the one who killed the art dealer is Mr Hyde, the whole thing is grotesquely implausible."
Then, as though addressing a vast unseen audience, he cried out into the empty air:
"Ten o'clock! If by ten o'clock tomorrow morning I cannot provide a complete account of the stolen inheritance and the circumstances of the murder, one spectacularly unlucky but fundamentally honest citizen will be imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. Why did the art dealer summon him that day? Why was the dealer killed immediately afterwards? Where have the unpublished manuscripts — worth hundreds of pounds — disappeared to? And not one soul is lifting a finger to answer any of these patently inexplicable questions!"
"The Yard thinks he's their man?"
"Naturally. They're salivating over circumstantial evidence like dogs over a bone. Dangle a shiny bauble before their eyes and they haven't the wit to look past it to the truth lying in the mud beneath."
With that, his gaze drifted back to the ceiling. I let out a small sigh. Then I reached into the fruit bowl, plucked one out, and held the bright red apple directly under his nose.
"What is this?"
"It's an apple," I said.
"Your brain runs on glucose. You won't eat a proper meal because you're worried about the post-prandial dip — fine. Fructose absorbs slowly, the fibre cushions the spike, and it'll keep your brain ticking without making you drowsy. Better than that sugary coffee by a long stretch. You should be eating proper food with starch and protein, but..."
I pressed the apple firmly into his reluctant hands and settled into my own chair.
"Eat that, and then we'll go back to the scene. I'll come with you."
I took a fresh apple from the bowl for myself and bit into it. The flesh was perfectly ripe, and sweet-sharp juice flooded my mouth. Sherlock fixed me with a glare that could have stripped paint as I sat there enjoying my modest supper, then said, brusquely:
"Back to the scene? Whatever for?"
"To find the evidence the Yard missed."
"You?"
"Don't be absurd. I'm just your blogger, remember?"
I gave an exaggerated shrug in the face of his derisive snort.
"You are the world's only consulting detective — the one person the police actually consult. You're not bound by the Yard's blinkered, assumption-laden approach to investigation. You find the evidence they overlook. You construct a work of deductive genius. You prove the innocence of your poor unfortunate client. You uncover the truth with that brilliant mind of yours. The only person alive who can do all of that. And I am your blogger — the one who records it all. So tell me, Sherlock: if that singular, irreplaceable person destroys his own health, who exactly is going to solve this case? And whose exploits am I supposed to chronicle?"
As I tossed my apple core — nothing left but the stem — into the rubbish bin, I noticed that he was still studying the apple I'd given him with an oddly intent expression.
"Ate an apfel avore gwain to bed, makes the doctor beg his bread."
"What?"
"An old proverb. An apple a day keeps illness at bay and the doctor from earning his keep."
"Ah, yes — the ancient health maxim. Apples really are supposed to be remarkably good for you, actually..."
The saying, if I recalled correctly, came from some medieval treatise on medicine. And it was true enough — apples were known for their benefits to digestion, for regulating the bowels, and for containing compounds that helped guard against arteriosclerosis and high blood pressure. They were a staple of weaning diets and invalid cookery for good reason. Not, of course, that one could live on apples alone. The old proverb itself had spawned any number of parodies over the years — substituting an onion, a pint of ale, or, in one particularly dubious version, a cigar. His sudden invocation of a health-related folk saying — so utterly out of character — had sent my mind racing through everything I knew about apples, none of which seemed to bear the remotest connection to the case that had been consuming him. While I stood there in bewilderment, Sherlock continued with something I never could have anticipated.
"The proverb earned the apple its nickname: 'the doctor's enemy.' — An intriguing proposition, John, but I must decline. I can hardly have my blogger driven to penury."
No sooner had the words left his mouth than he uncoiled his long frame from the sofa with the kinetic violence of a released spring, lobbed the apple back at me — I fumbled to catch it — wound his scarf around his neck with practised ease, and was down the stairs and out of the flat with the swiftness of a gale.
"No — Sherlock, that logic is completely — that's not even what the proverb — "
I murmured, staring down at the pristine, unblemished apple that had found its way back into my hands. In the end, I had failed to get so much as a morsel into him. But he did seem to have recovered some of his fight, so I supposed I'd count it as a partial victory for now. If we could find something at the scene to spark that formidable intellect — some clear, unambiguous piece of evidence — and if the client's innocence could be proven, and if the Yard investigators, confronted with the brilliance of his deduction, could be persuaded to offer him even a grudging word of thanks or flattery, then this whole wretched business of self-neglect would resolve itself in an instant.
"Oh my — off out, are you?"
I came pounding down the stairs a few paces behind Sherlock — heart hammering, and not entirely from the exertion — to find Mrs Hudson peering out of her door, drawn by the commotion.
"Yes, Mrs Hudson. I'm sorry to ask, but would you mind clearing away the breakfast upstairs and putting together something nourishing? I don't mind at all if it's gone cold by the time we get back."
"I'm your landlady, dear, not your housekeeper."
"John! What are you doing? Come on!"
"...Well. Sherlock seems to be back to his usual self, at any rate." Mrs Hudson gave a soft, knowing laugh. "I'm not your housekeeper, but I'll make something special, just this once. Only this once, mind?"
She glanced towards the front door, where Sherlock was making his impatience known at considerable volume, and chuckled.
As we stepped onto the pavement, I noticed the CCTV camera on the corner swivel to track our exit. Big Brother was watching, as always. Sherlock, naturally, ignored it.
I had a feeling that by the time we returned to the flat, the sitting-room table would be laid with a warm supper. And despite her insistence on "just this once," I was equally certain she'd have breakfast waiting for us in the morning. And though I had no evidence whatsoever to support the notion, I had a quiet suspicion that our client would not be standing in the dock tomorrow. Not, at any rate, while the great detective whose blogger I served was firing on all cylinders like that.